BLU doesn't have a particularly great reputation for its phones' software, and the recent discovery of spyware on its phones, including those sold in the US, certainly didn't help it. However, the company's popular R1 HD, best known for costing Amazon Prime members only $50, has just received an update with some nice improvements for T-Mobile customers.

After updating, R1 HDs will be capable of connecting to T-Mobile's band 12. This allows for better indoor reception and greater range than previously possible. It also brings VoLTE (Voice over LTE), which I'd like to think is pretty self-explanatory. Even though these features have been promised to R1 HD owners for a while now, it's nice to see BLU finally fulfill this obligation.

The update, which weighs in at around 373MB and carries the version number BLU_R0010UU_V7.4.2GENERIC_6.0_20161109-1343, also brings "Android Security Updates," although it's unclear which ones. The R1 HD's been out of stock on Amazon for a few months, but these additions will no doubt please existing owners on T-Mo.

Comments

blindexecutioner

But no wifi calling. Ho hum...

yochanan

Your source apparently neither knows how to take a screenshot nor check the security patch level.

Terirbeauchamp

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thespacecowboy

Hey, it was 6:30pm. He'd probably had a long day at the office dealing with meeting and stuff. Give anonymous tipster a break :)

Alex De La Rosa

Getting an Update from Blu is like getting a microsd card on a Pixel phone.﻿

tehboogieman

Apparently not

JG

I'm really hoping during their next Made By Google, they announce that all future Google hardware (including whatever they're holding that event for) will come equipped with a microSD slot. Even things like the second generation Google Home should come with a microSD card slot.

Not for the storage aspect (though that would be "icing on the cake" secondary benefit). But mainly I'm hoping Google releases Project Vault. Vault is a Google ATAP project, so it would fit right in with the Made By Google motif.

I would happily buy a card for all of my electronics - desktop, laptop, phone, tablet, watch, chromebook, etc. That way my watch can securely talk to my phone to tell it to send an encrypted SMS to my friend and receive the reply equally securely.

Random!

Your watch is gonna talk securely to your phone... Through an SD card?
I'm the biggest defender of microsd cards, but what you said makes no sense.

br_hermon

Google is your friend. Come on man...

JG

No... A random off the shelf microSD will not secure communcations between my watch and phone (or any other devices for that matter).

A Project Vault microSD will, however, or more specifically, the cryptographic system embedded within the card will.

Project Vault was designed to allow even novice users the ability to simply encrypt any and all data either stored on the device itself or transmitted through the device - such as phone calls, SMS messages, etc.

They announced it at i/o '15. Unfortunately, their GitHub page has become stagnate and it wasn't mentioned at all during i/o '16. But at the 2015 conference they showed prototypes and mentioned they had some 500 (I think) in use at Google for early testing. Though this spring, during the San Bernardino iPhone unlocking controversy, Peiter Zatko (aka Mudge), who was the team leader of Project Vault before leaving Google encouraged Google to release the device Which makes me hopeful that if the former team leader thinks it can (and should) be made available, then there likely wasn't any serious issues that caused Google to scrap the project.

Will never happen. Google sells cloud storage. They'll sooner port Pixel exclusive features than do that. And they won't be doing that either.

Ajmobileguru

Yep. One of the biggest draws of a Pixel phone is their unlimited Cloud storage for Photos. Google wont cannibalize it by giving us a Micro SD Slot. They have tried their best to make it very difficult to use Micro SD cards since Kitkat.

JG

1.) The presence of removable storage does not prevent the use of cloud based services. I can't speak for everyone, but I would still continue to use Drive, Play Books, Movie & TV, Music (and continue the Music/YouTube Red subscription - even probably expanding to Unplugged when/if it launches), Maps, Photos, etc as I do now, sans microSD. The only difference I'll be able to hold twice as many photos on my device before I have to hunt for a WiFi network to use to upload them [which will be useful this summer since I'll be vacationing in a remote (aka data-less) photographic area].

2.) If extra local storage were an issue, would Google really sell a 128GB phone, or Apple (who offers similar cloud based services) a 256GB phone? Wouldn't they cap the phones at 32 or maybe 64GBs so we have even more encouragement to use cloud offerings?

Further, if removable storage was such a threat to Google, why do they provide SD slots on the Chromebook Pixels, which rely on Google's cloud offerings just as much - if not more - than Android? Or why wouldn't Google disable removable storage features from their own Android offerings? My Nexus 9 has no problem using a USB flash drive as storage and under M can even mount it as internal storage.

3.) I don't know about the Pixel, but Nexus devices were never really mainstream. All other major OEMs support microSD. If Google is relying on Nexus owners exclusively to keep their cloud storage offerings afloat... That may not be the most sound choice.

4.) While Google couldn't force someone to use a Project Vault microSD over a regular (and probably cheaper) microSD, I would still like to think that the utility of bringing encryption to the masses* in an easy to use form would outweigh the losses from users gaining a little extra local storage.

*Vault wouldn't be limited to just Pixel 2 users, but could be used on any microSD enabled device, including, for example, my old Galaxy S4, and non-Android devices like my desktop..

bekifft

All of those points ignore the core issue. Point 1 you counter yourself at the end of the paragraph, twice as much storage. Point 2, they make a huge margin on that extra little bit of flash storage, it's more than they'd make from the average cloud user in quite some time, I'd wager. 3 is a strawman, of course it's not their only revenue stream, but they do control the hardware so why would they?
4 sounds good to me but as it always seems to go in technology, it doesn't matter that it's a technologically elegant solution. Companies have no incentive to push it, and customers don't understand what it is enough to ask for it. Talk about a small number of people. You're taking your already admittedly small Nexus numbers, and maybe a fraction of those would use this.

Does it have good support? I've been thinking about getting a backup phone.

Bill Bizby

Right after I got mine (July?), there was an immediate update. No updates since. Even so, mine was already on the version that had the spyware removed (i.e. from the July update), sooOOooo...

...not a bad backup phone, at all!

Daniel Marcus

Yes, it has. It wasn't actually spyware, BTW. It was a debugging version of the update software to help one of their other clients identify some problems. They sent the wrong version to Blu, who apparently didn't test it very thoroughly.